The army team played a marathon – Sport – Kommersant
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At the start of the Western Conference finals in the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) Fonbet playoffs, CSKA defeated SKA 3:2, deciding the outcome of the match in the third overtime. The army team from St. Petersburg did not take advantage of their site, as well as the fact that their Moscow teammates only four days ago finished a difficult series of the second round with Lokomotiv.
There is such a tradition in the KHL that CSKA and SKA meet every year in the Western Conference final. It originated in the 2014/15 season, and since then there have been only two cases when this meeting did not take place. In 2017, Muscovites did not appear at it, losing to Lokomotiv, and in 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the play-offs had to be canceled altogether. Therefore, it is not surprising that the army clubs were in the western final for the seventh time. Moreover, in the last five, the capital’s army team defeated the St. Petersburg ones.
Of course, it was good for SKA that CSKA spent a lot of energy in the previous rounds, having played a total of four matches more.
And if the Muscovites fought with Lokomotiv until March 29, then the team of Roman Rotenberg, having quickly dealt with Torpedo, had already rested since the 23rd and received an extra week to recover.
Perhaps this was its main advantage. Plus, the Petersburgers started at home, besides, Dmitry Yashkin, the top scorer and sniper of the regular season, returned to the ranks.
However, it was CSKA who quickly rolled into the series and opened the scoring already in the second minute, when Mikhail Grigorenko went to a lethal position, withstood a grandmaster pause, laying a defender and goalkeeper on the ice, after which he gave the puck to an empty net to Maxim Mamin. And in terms of the game, the debut of the match was clearly left for the Muscovites. The hosts turned on only by the middle of the first period, and Yashkin hit the post with a penny, and then the guests’ goalkeeper Adam Reideborn managed to finish off Valentin Zykov. But if it was 1:1 on the bars after Anton Slepyshev’s shot, then it was 1:0 in favor of CSKA on goals before the break.
However, SKA scored a quick puck in the second twenty minutes. Svyatoslav Grebenshchikov ran one on one with Reideborn and accidentally performed the famous trick of the National Hockey League star Nikita Kucherov with a false stick movement. For the Petersburger, the puck just went off the hook and crawled in a straight line under the goalkeeper into the net.
And soon the hosts were leading 2:1. This time, defender Alexander Nikishin hit Reideborn with a powerful flick. It even seemed that the Swede swam a little, and with him the whole of CSKA.
SKA increased the pressure and tried to shoot as often as possible, but Reideborn showed that he was in full order with psychological stability. And when he happened to face Grebenshchikov face-to-face again, he no longer allowed himself to be deceived.
Despite the fact that in the second period the guests did not look their best, especially in attack, they still remained in the game. And in the third segment of the meeting, the wards of Sergei Fedorov really added aggression, but the goalkeeper Dmitry Nikolaev was not really strained. And when Vitaly Abramov still had a good moment, the first number of the Petersburgers rescued the careless partners. SKA built a reinforced concrete defense, and CSKA lacked the power to overcome it. But in the end, the Muscovites removed Reideborn and six of them immediately recouped. Nikita Nesterov delivered a mighty shot from a distance, and Vladislav Kamenev turned his stick and sent the match into overtime.
In the fourth period, the hosts played more proactive again, and it was time for Reideborn. The Swede did not flinch, and then the guests started a seemingly stupid hustle in a foreign zone, after which they seized the initiative, and already Nikolaev moved to the fore.
If not for him, Mamin and Sergey Plotnikov could well finish the game and bring success to CSKA. And so the teams were forced to continue to sort things out in the second overtime, which also proceeded in a viscous stubborn struggle. Nikolaev still had to tumble more than Reideborn, and a couple of times he frankly dragged – in particular, from Andrey Svetlakov and defender Darren Dietz, who almost drew a masterpiece with a wrist throw from dribbling. SKA almost took the victory in the last seconds of the fifth twenty-minute period, and the match smoothly moved into the sixth.
This hockey marathon finished in the 103rd minute, when defender Nesterov sent the puck to the target without outside help, catching Nikolaev on a small positional error and charging from the blue line from Grigorenko’s pass. 3:2 – and CSKA took the first step towards the main final of the Gagarin Cup. The next match of the series will take place on Tuesday in the same place, in St. Petersburg. And in the finals of the Eastern Conference, Ak Bars is ahead, having defeated Avangard at home also with a score of 3: 2 and also in overtime, which, however, turned out to be very short.
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